FilmSnobReviews

Title: Doing Money
MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated
Director: Lynsey Miller
Starring: Anca Dumitra, Alan Leech, Cosmina Stratan
Runtime: 1 hour 22 minutes

What It Is: True story of Ana (Anca Dumitra), a young Romanian woman taken off the streets of London and forced into a life of prostitution by a gang of sex traffickers.

What We Think: Ana’s Voice over in the opening scenes of the film, her simplistic reasoning for her situation escalation, drills deep into the bones of the audience. As we watch her go from independent human to reliant on the very people trafficking her to survive, we lose our sense of daily comfort.

She fights, as so many would willingly note that they would do in the same situation. Fight and struggle with every effort to break the free of a situation quickly laid out as futile. As the audience watches her do everything one would note is an act of bravery, we are also subjected to the consequences of those brave acts when one is captive to people that have long lost their humanity. In a story where a criminal may well be the most moral person on the screen, its hard not to lose one’s hope that Ana will ever escape.

Yet we hope, we hope not just for her, but the girls long lost to acceptance of the very situation we watch unfold on screen.

Our Grade: B+, It’s hard not to get up after the film and want to demand action, as the film is intended to do listed under the social impact category of the films previewed at the San Diego International Film festival, yet the story itself is so overwhelming, so well filmed and so well told, that the driving emotion remains hope. Worth a watch, if nothing for a better understanding of what they mean when they say that so many go ‘unseen’.